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Going Around
  • Published: 3 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781644214510
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $59.99

Going Around

Selected Journalism

Formats & editions
EBook
7 Oct 2025
Paperback
3 June 2025
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A definitive collection of writings by the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997) with a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathering dozens of columns, essays, and critiques from publications including The New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Newsday.

With many uncollected and long out-of-print writings, this is the first volume of Kempton’s work to appear in 30 years, a book that resdiscovers the legendary figure of journalism that David Remnick called “the greatest newspaperman in town.”

“The man is a marvel. It’s like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge: you don’t know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off.” —Frank Sinatra

A definitive collection of the writings of legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997), Going Around gathers dozens of columns, articles and essays, from The New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Newsday, among others, most never before collected in book form.

“The man is a marvel. It’s like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge: you don’t know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off.” —Frank Sinatra

Known for riding his bicycle around New York City in three-piece suits and polished oxfords while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe, Kempton possessed a roving and unconventional mind, which often led him to the toughest issues of the day—especially the Civil Rights Movement—which he covered with wit and a breathtaking sense of moral urgency. Whether he was describing a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, or an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, Kempton had a knack for saying the things that no other reporter could or would, writing unequivocally in a way that made him a hero to other writers and editors.
Here is a legendary figure of journalism, whom David Remnick once described as “the greatest newspaperman in town."
  • Published: 3 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781644214510
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $59.99
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About the authors

Murray Kempton

MURRAY KEMPTON was born in 1917 and raised in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. He spent much of his career as a columnist for The New York Post and, later, New York Newsday. He wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books and contributed journalism, essays, and criticism to publications including The Progressive, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic, where he worked briefly as an editor. He wrote two books: Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1955) and The Briar Patch: The People of New York vs. Lumumba Shakur, et al. (1973), which won a National Book Award. His other distinctions include two George Polk awards; the inaugural Sidney Hillman Prize; a Grammy for his contribution to the liner notes of a Frank Sinatra boxed set; and the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1985. He died in New York City in 1997.
MK

Andrew Holter

ANDREW HOLTER (b. 1990) is a historian and writer based in Chicago, formerly of Frederick, Maryland, and Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lapham’s Quarterly, and other publications. As an independent historical researcher, he has contributed to books, radio programs, and museum exhibitions, and served as the primary archival consultant for Theo Anthony’s 2016 documentary Rat Film, which the New Yorker called one of “62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.”
AH

Praise for Going Around

“[An] astonishing experience. Reading Kempton. . . all at once in a book, is like watching an endless parade of the great characters of American life. . . Kempton’s sense of the absurd and his ability to sketch a scene in a few sentences, to deflate the pompous in a phrase, make the parade as rich as any great novel.” —David Remnick


“[Kempton is] unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.'' —Robert Silvers

“I grew up reading Murray, and the whole idea of him awed me. I had this romantic vision of this guy roaming the precincts and then going into a lonely newspaper office and then walking home on the empty streets having left behind this thing of beauty. I guess mine was the only room at Williams College to subscribe to the Post, and I got it so I could read Kempton.” —John Kifner, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times

“The man has brought more honor to newspapers than anyone in my lifetime.” —Jimmy Breslin, fellow-columnist at Newsday

“I thought my administration was one of the best in the history of New York City, and he didn’t. I found him very unfair. But how can you have ill will toward a saint? He’s Saint Murray.” —Edward Koch, former New York City mayor

“When a newspaper hires a snake like Kempton they can expect the worst. . . . I am surprised that Scripps-Howard are taking on this rat.. . .  Kempton has written many columns belittling me and criticizing my administration of the FBI. . . .A real stinker.” —J. Edgar Hoover

“Murray Kempton’s current articles in the New York Post on the Alabama situation are just about the most moving pieces of American reportage I’ve ever read,” —Langston Hughes, written during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Hughes, a columnist himself, urged Simon and Schuster to commission a book from Kempton.)

In 1956, Dr. King wrote Kempton a letter of thanks for columns that “expressed the spirit of the movement,” citing also the “contributions that have come into our office as the result of your articles.”

Alfred Kazin would remember Kempton as “my only radical friend from the 1930’s who never sold out.”